It has been clear in my five years at City University that every cohort of post-grad journalism students has been overwhelmingly middle class.

I'm not going to get into arguments about the difficulties involved in defining social class. I'm willing to accept the report's claim at face value, despite the elasticity of the term "middle class".

There have been substantial demographic changes since I began my journalistic career in 1964 as a working class baby boomer benefiting from the chance to clamber up the class ladder.

At my first local paper, the Barking and Dagenham Advertiser, I found myself in the company of other working class staff - from the cleaner to the editor.

The same was the case with all the young reporters on rival papers I met at court each morning. And it was largely true also among my contemporaries who attended the NCTJ day-release training course at West Ham college of further education.

Geography was irrelevant. In 1967, I moved to the Lancashire Evening Telegraph in Blackburn and the editorial staff there were also drawn from the working class. (I think one sub editor, also from "down south", may have qualified as a member of the middle classes).

The following year I joined the subs' bench at the Daily Mail's northern office. Virtually all the journalists there, from the old hands down to the new intake, were working class.

Nearly all of my contemporaries at the Mail were products of grammar schools. We were on the way "up", unconscious of the fact that we were the advance guard of a radical change in British society.

The working class "masses" were on the move, leading eventually to the middle class becoming the nation's dominant social class.

When I arrived in Fleet Street at the end of 1969 I soon realised that there was a class division. The serious broadsheets were overwhelmingly peopled by the middle classes while the popular press was a working class enclave.

There were odd exceptions, of course, and these were noted on each side of the class divide. But the barrier was already being dismantled.

Over the following 25 years, the class composition of national newspapers gradually changed. The Sunday Times I joined in 1987 was no longer a middle class ghetto.

Though most of its executives were Oxbridge graduates, it was also the case that the previous middle classness of Oxford and Cambridge university entrance had begun to change too.

Similarly, the popular press was no longer scorned by the middle class. Many of the reporters and writers on red-tops are no longer working class stalwarts.

By the late 1980s, entrance to journalism was also increasingly dependent on academic qualifications that ensured that almost everyone needed a university degree.

This was not such a problem until, say, the middle 1990s, because working class entrance to tertiary education improved year by year.

But the middle classes remained predominant and the barriers for working class entrance to university were also raised (not least by higher tuition fees and the fear of getting into debt by obtaining loans). To be honest, education became expensive.

Other factors were also beginning to dictate who did, and didn't, get a start on newspapers. From at least the early 1990s onwards, huge numbers of middle class graduates sought careers in the media.

Newspaper editors and broadcasting executives were presented with a seemingly unlimited choice of applicants with superb academic qualifications. This tipped the balance towards the middle class.

Even if some local paper editors were prepared to give the odd school-leaver a chance, most of the London-based media organisations favoured middle class university graduates.

Then came the phenomenon of working for nothing. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasters discovered a ready supply of young, enthusiastic students willing to take up unpaid short-term work experience places and even long-term internships. Only the wealthiest of budding journalists can afford to work without pay.

Indeed, only relatively wealthy young people can afford to take the one-year post-grad course at City University. We now charge about £8,000 to enrol on the masters course in journalism, a well-known stepping stone towards journalistic careers in newspapers, magazines, television and radio.

Given the high cost of accommodation in London, it is virtually impossible for working class graduates to afford (though I concede that, remarkably, some still manage to do so).

Even if they do take the plunge, they find it challenging to make ends meet. For example, one dedicated female working class student I got to know well worked for hours every night serving in a West End bar. (She is, I'm glad to say, prospering now in a TV production company).

I also discovered that one student from a wealthy background, having heard about a working class colleague who had got into financial difficulties, had generously provided her with a room in her house free of charge.

But the working class will not advance courtesy of odd cases of middle class patronage. We have reached a position in which the working class do not even consider "the media" as a career possibility.

In so doing, Ponsford makes a further point - that the advance of the middle classes into the senior editorial positions tends to entrench the middle class bias because they prefer, unsurprisingly, to appoint people like themselves.

But why should it matter? If the middle class is now the largest class in Britain, where's the problem? Is it not an advantage to have better educated journalists regardless of social class?

I'll return to that in a posting tomorrow. For now though, I'll leave those questions for you to think about.